Nation and World

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told Costa Mesa congressman Dana Rohrabacher on Wednesday that Russia was not involved with leaking controversial emails from the Democratic National Committee during last year’s presidential campaign.

LOS ANGELES — Mayor Eric Garcetti will be in New Hampshire Aug. 28 to campaign for Manchester mayoral candidate Joyce Craig, according to reports published today. New Hampshire is the site of the nation’s first presidential primary.

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — Contradicting a boss already under pressure to fire him, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon says there’s no military solution to the threat posed by North Korea and its nuclear ambitions.

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Philippine police killed at least 26 more drug suspects in overnight gunbattles in the capital, bringing to 58 the death toll in a renewed bloody crackdown in the last three days that received praises from the president.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump bitingly decried the rising movement to pull down monuments to Confederate icons Thursday, declaring the nation is seeing “the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart.

BARCELONA, Spain >> A van veered onto a sidewalk and barreled down a busy pedestrian zone Thursday in Barcelona’s picturesque Las Ramblas district, swerving from side to side as it mowed down tourists and residents and turned the popular European vacation promenade into a bloody killing zone.

NEW YORK — U.S. stocks plunged Thursday as losses for Cisco Systems hurt technology companies while Wal-Mart declined after its latest quarterly report. Banks also dropped as bond yields and interest rates sank for a second day.

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump defiantly blamed “both sides” for the weekend violence between white supremacists and counter-demonstrators in Virginia, seeking to rebuff the widespread criticism of his handling of the emotionally-charged protests while showing sympathy for the fringe group’s efforts to preserve Confederate monuments.

BEIJING — China has urged the United States and North Korea to “hit the brakes” on threatening words and work toward a peaceful resolution of their tense standoff created by Pyongyang’s recent missile tests and threats to fire them toward Guam.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Twitter says former President Barack Obama’s tweet in response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend has taken the crown as the platform’s most-liked post ever.

LOS ANGELES — After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the era of nuclear nightmares — of the atomic arms race, of backyard bomb shelters, of schoolchildren diving under desks to practice their survival skills in the event of an attack — seemed to finally, thankfully, fade into history.

LONDON — The British government has vowed repeatedly to end the free movement of people from the European Union when the U.K. leaves the bloc in 2019. But on Wednesday it acknowledged that, in one area of the country, it won’t.

A memorial honoring Confederate veterans has been removed from the Hollywood Forever cemetery days after deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, erupted over the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen.

NEW YORK >> His party in turmoil, the Senate’s top Republican on Wednesday condemned the “messages of hate and bigotry” carried by the KKK and white supremacists. But like other top GOP officials, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did not criticize President Donald Trump, who said a day earlier the white supremacists don’t bear all the blame for last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump on Tuesday ripped into business leaders who resigned from his White House jobs panel — the latest sign that corporate America’s romance with Trump is faltering — after his equivocal response to violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.

NEW YORK >> Combative and insistent, President Donald Trump declared anew Tuesday “there is blame on both sides” for the deadly violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, appearing to once again equate the actions of white supremacist groups and those protesting them.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A lawsuit claims a suburban Philadelphia woman got an extra topping in her Chick-fil-A sandwich: a dead rodent. Ellen Manfalouti sued in Bucks County Court over the tiny rodent she claims was baked into the bottom bun of her chicken sandwich.

Cities and states accelerated their plans to remove Confederate monuments from public property Tuesday as the violence over a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, moved leaders across the country to plan to wipe away much of the remaining Old South imagery.

SEOUL, South Korea >> North Korea’s military on Tuesday presented leader Kim Jong Un with plans to launch missiles into waters near Guam and “wring the windpipes of the Yankees,” even as both Koreas and the United States signaled their willingness to avert a deepening crisis, with each suggesting a path toward negotiations.

WASHINGTON — The American workplace is grueling, stressful and surprisingly hostile. So concludes an in-depth study of 3,066 U.S. workers by the Rand Corp., Harvard Medical School and the University of California Los Angeles.

WASHINGTON >> Bowing to pressure from right and left, President Donald Trump condemned white supremacist groups by name on Monday, declaring “racism is evil” after two days of public equivocation and internal White House debate over the deadly race-fueled clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia.

TRENTON, N.J. >> The CEOs of athletic wear manufacturer Under Armour, computer chip maker Intel and pharmaceutical company Merck resigned Monday from the White House’s American Manufacturing Council — with the Merck withdrawal drawing a quick and angry Twitter outburst from President Donald Trump.

PHOENIX (AP) — Joe Bologna, the actor, director and writer known for his role in the 1982 film comedy “My Favorite Year,” died Sunday. He was 82. Bologna died in the Los Angeles area after a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer, his manager Matt Sherman told The Associated Press.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — A man accused of ramming his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at a white nationalist rally in Virginia was denied bond Monday after the public defender’s office said it couldn’t represent him and the judge was forced to find a local attorney to fill in.

WASHINGTON — It took President Donald Trump three days to do what should have come fast and easy. In his carefully worded statement Monday, Trump condemned members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and white supremacists as “repugnant.

LOS ANGELES — A Twitter group that sought to draft former Vice President Joe Biden to run for president in 2016 has started a campaign to support Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to run for president in 2020, and has over 5,600 followers as of today.

SEOUL, South Korea >> Even as North Korea presented leader Kim Jong Un with plans to launch missiles into waters near Guam and “wring the windpipes of the Yankees,” both Koreas and the United States signaled their willingness to avert a deepening crisis Tuesday, with each suggesting a path toward negotiations.

LOS ANGELES >> Miley Cyrus and Bruno Mars will be among the honorees at Sunday’s Teen Choice 2017 awards. The 19th annual show will feature performances from French Montana, Rita Ora and Louis Tomlinson during a two-hour broadcast that honors stars from film, television, sports and even YouTube personalities.

WASHINGTON >> Vice President Mike Pence will visit Colombia amid escalating tensions with neighboring Venezuela and North Korea. Pence is set to meet with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos on Sunday at the start of a weeklong trip to Latin America that is likely to be dominated by conversations about the deepening crisis in Venezuela, where the U.

WASHINGTON >> Seeking leverage with Russia, the Trump administration has reopened consideration of long-rejected plans to give Ukraine lethal weapons, even if that would plunge the United States deeper into the former Soviet republic’s conflict.

TEHRAN, Iran >> Chanting “Death to America,” Iran’s parliament voted unanimously Sunday to increase spending on its ballistic missile program and the foreign operations of its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, part of a sanctions bill mirroring a new U.

KUWAIT CITY >> Kuwait battled Sunday to control an oil spill off its southern coast that stained its beaches, threatened to damage power plants and water stations, and left long black slicks in the Persian Gulf.

BEDMINSTER, N.J. >> The White House scrambled Sunday to elaborate on President Donald Trump’s response to deadly, race-fueled clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, as he came under bipartisan scolding for not clearly condemning white supremacists and other hate groups immediately after the altercations.

FREMONT, Calif. >> When Moina Shaiq realized even her friends were scared to ask her about her religion for fear of offending her or sounding uneducated, she put an advertisement in a California newspaper: “Questions and answers about being Muslim.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. >>The Latest on incidents related to violent clashes between white supremacist groups and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left three dead (all times local): 3:55 p.

BEIRUT >> The Syrian government has increased the size of the territory under its control by 2 ½ times in just two months, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Sunday, as Syrian forces backed by regional allies and the Russian air force seized thousands of square miles (kilometers) from the Islamic State group in the center of the country.

NEW YORK >> The “Conjuring” spinoff “Annabelle: Creation” scared up an estimated $35 million in North American theaters over the weekend, making it easily the top film and giving the lagging August box office a shot in the arm.

WASHINGTON >> Senior U.S. national security officials said Sunday that a military confrontation with North Korea’s is not imminent, but they cautioned that the possibility of war is greater than it was a decade ago.

SEOUL, South Korea >> North Korea’s announcement that it is finalizing a plan to launch four ballistic missiles over Japan toward the island of Guam has touched off a series of fiery threats from President Donald Trump and upped tensions between Pyongyang and Washington to a whole new level.

LUCKNOW, India >> Parents of at least 35 children who have died in a state-run hospital in northern India over the past three days have alleged that the fatalities were due to the lack of a sufficient oxygen supply in the children’s ward.

WASHINGTON >> Donald Trump’s attacks on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell come at the worst possible time, if the president’s goal is actually to advance his agenda on health care, infrastructure and taxes that he’s goading his GOP ally to pass.

NAIROBI, Kenya >> Kenya’s post-election violence worsened Saturday as police used tear gas on a convoy of opposition officials in the capital and a mortuary official said nine bodies with gunshot wounds were brought to a Nairobi morgue from a slum that’s an opposition stronghold.

SEOUL, South Korea >> Chinese President Xi Jinping made a plea for cool-headedness over escalating tensions between the U.S. and North Korea in a phone conversation with U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday, urging both sides to avoid words or actions that could worsen the situation.